MSNBC might like to replace "Lean Forward" with a new slogan: "Dissent Is Unpatriotic." On today's Morning Joe, discussing the Rudy flap, Mika Brzezinski said: "I question the patriotism of someone who questions the president's patriotism." Joe Scarborough retorted that for years on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann got away with saying much worse about W without criticism from Mika or others in the MSM. View the video here.

KING, Wis. — At the old union hall here on a recent afternoon, Terry Magnant sat at the head of a table surrounded by 18 empty chairs. A members meeting had been scheduled to start a half-hour earlier, but the small house, with its cracked walls and loose roof shingles, was lonely and desolate. “There used to be a lot more people coming,” said Magnant, a 51-year-old nursing assistant, sighing. The anti-union law passed here four years ago, which made Gov. Scott Walker a national Republican star and a possible presidential candidate, has turned out to be even more transformative...

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush may find out that Wall Street money will not buy him the love of GOP primary voters like it does mainstream media elites who are rushing to cast him as the 2016 frontrunner. As soon as Mitt Romney announced that he would not make a third White House run, the mainstream press immediately anointed Bush as the clear Republican 2016 frontrunner. They made their pronouncements even though Bush had not yet proven with his speeches that he can be a successful candidate in the digital age and neither had the best ground game nor the...

Brian Williams, the face of the NBC News division and among its most visible personalities for the past decade, has been suspended from his post at??Nightly News for six months without pay.?? Lester Holt, who has been filling in for Williams since Feb. 9, will continue as interim anchor of Nightly News. "We have decided today to suspend Brian Williams as Managing Editor and Anchor of NBC Nightly News for six months. The suspension will be without pay and is effective immediately," NBC News president Deborah Turness said in a memo, adding that "this was a very hard decision. Certainly...

Rand Paul does a lot of interviews -- a lot. This, from time to time, has gotten him in trouble. Rarely, though, has it gone as poorly as this. Speaking Monday afternoon with CNBC, Paul: 1) Reiterated his contention that vaccines should be voluntary. 2) Said this: "I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking, normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines." (Michele Bachmann said something similar during the 2012 presidential campaign. It didn't go over well.) 3) Actually shushed the anchor when he thought she wasn't allowing him to answer her questions.

LEIPZIG, Germany – Wednesday night saw a flare of violence and an accompanying police operation on a scale without precedent in recent German history. A group opposing militant Islam in Europe has called a demonstration, the city is deafened by political slogans played over loudspeakers, property is vandalised, and explosives are thrown at police in colossal running battles that involve thousands of people. If you got your news from the mainstream media, what is increasingly known in Germany as the ‘liar press’ (Luegenpresse), the story might very well end there. Then again, the report might also throw in salacious details...

Colorado Springs, Colo. — From the liberal media’s coverage of my beautiful adopted hometown, you’d think we live in a KKK-infested hotbed where every person of color fears for his or her life. Take a look at these ominous headlines: “Bombing of NAACP headquarters harkens to bad old days” — MSNBC “Colorado Springs explosion recalls violence against NAACP” — the Washington Post “NAACP Bombing Evokes Memories of Civil Rights Strife” — Time magazine “Explosion outside NAACP office could be a hate crime, officials say” — the Los Angeles Times Let me and my brown skin assure you, America: Bull Connor...

CNN’s Max Foster interviewed Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal over the weekend. He grilled Jindal on so-called “no-go zones.” Pay attention to what Jindal actually said, as documented by CNN. Jindal was also unable to offer examples during an earlier interview with CNN’s Max Foster, saying that he’s “heard from folks here that there are neighborhoods where women don’t feel comfortable going in without veils … We all know that there are neighborhoods where police are less likely to go into.” “I think that the radical Left absolutely wants to pretend like this problem is not here. Pretending it’s not here...

First Of All, Its A "CNN Poll". So already we can assume they probably did not call people in "Crucial Purple" States". Maybe the far left media is already working on their own version of "Operation Chaos"?.Making sure they keep Ted Cruz and Scott Walker out of the race and polls. As the media keeps bringing up the 2016 race and potential candidates, they seem to be focusing on Bush, Christie, Romney and Paul. And please! enough of the biased polls with GOP candidates against Hillary! We all know that most Conservative candidates will beat Hillary. Lets just wait till...

What follows is an object lesson in why year-end best, worst and other lists shouldn't be published until the year actually ends. A Kwanzaa "parade" was held in Los Angeles yesterday. In reporting on the event, CBS Los Angeles published a work of fiction which absolutely belongs on any 2014 list of most embarrassing moments in journalism (HT Twitchy; bolds are mine):

On Sunday, CNN’s Inside Politics spent several minutes hyping the supposed headache Tea Partiers could give GOP leadership despite the Republican Party winning their 54th Senate seat following Saturday’s runoff in Louisiana. During the discussion, Robert Costa of The Washington Post insisted that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying “to govern responsibly and he wants to set the party up for major gains in '16. And that started in 2014 by pushing back the Tea Party and it starts now by making sure that all the passions and eagerness in the House don't overtake the party.”

Following his on-duty shooting of robbery suspect Michael Brown in August, Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson was targeted by protesters who automatically assumed the white officer was motivated by racism instead of a legitimate threat on his life. When a grand jury privy to the details of this incident determined the veteran officer should not be charged in the shooting, threats against his life only increased as rioters looted and destroyed businesses in the St. Louis suburb. Amid the civil unrest, New York Times reporter Julie Bosman stoked tensions by releasing the name of the street on which Wilson...

Any day now, I am expecting to turn on the tube and see an ad that says, “More Americans get their TV news from Fox than anywhere else.”. Whether that pleases or horrifies you, it’s time to think seriously about what that says about Fox, CNN, MSNBC, the state of network news today and the role TV plays or doesn’t play in providing us with reliable, trustworthy information. Much of the media establishment seems bent on ignoring the incredible ratings success of Fox News. Or, maybe it’s just that Fox has pounded CNN and MSNBC in the ratings for so...

The White House is exasperated with the major broadcast networks – ABC, CBS and NBC -- for skipping out on President Barack Obama’s Thursday primetime address on his executive actions on immigration. “In 2006, Bush gave a 17 minute speech that was televised by all three networks that was about deploying 6000 national guard troops to the border. Obama is making a 10 minute speech that will have a vastly greater impact on the issue. And none of the networks are doing it. We can’t believe they were aggrieved that we announced this on Facebook,” a senior administration official told...

The Obama administration, despite the president's promises of transparency, is "more dangerous" to the media than any other White House in history, USA Today's Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said this weekend. Page, speaking Saturday at a White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) seminar, also said the administration is "more restrictive," in reference to the its leak investigations and naming Fox News' James Rosen as a co-conspirator in a violation of the federal Espionage Act, writes The Washington Post's Eric Wemple in an opinion piece Tuesday. Veteran New York Times reporter Peter Baker, telling one of the stories, said that while...

At some point, a compendium of condemnations against the Obama administration’s record of media transparency (actually, opacity) must be assembled. Notable quotations in this vein come from former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who said, “It is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering”; New York Times reporter James Risen, who said, “I think Obama hates the press”; and CBS News’s Bob Schieffer, who said, “This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush’s did, and his before that.” USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page has added a sharper edge to...

Sunday on Fox News Channel's "MediaBuzz," Bob Woodward said there are, "lots of unanswered questions," about the Obama administrations involvement in the IRS scandal surrounding the targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny. Woodward said, "The reality now in my view that in the Obama administration, there are lots of unanswered questions about the IRS, particularly. If I were young, I would take Carl Bernstein and move to Cincinnati where that IRS office is and set up headquarters and go talk to everyone."

The nation’s Big Three TV networks that breathlessly reported the 2006 anti-Bush election which gave Democrats control of Capitol Hill have practically ignored this year’s anti-Obama midterms that are expected to return full control of the Hill to the GOP. A new and exhaustive Media Research Center analysis compared the last seven weeks of CBS, NBC and ABC news coverage with the same period in 2006 and found a 6-1 disparity between the Democratic election wave and the current election. The story count: 159-25.

It's important to remember that, in police shooting cases like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, the initial facts are often wrong. You don't want to end up looking like Rich Lowry, National Review editor, whose March 23, 2012, column on the Trayvon Martin shooting was titled, "Al Sharpton Is Right."

Paul Farhi of The Washington Post writes today about a trend at the White House—and throughout journalism—that threatens the quality and credibility of news-gathering: Public-relations "minders" are injecting themselves into our interviews with politicians, CEOs, and other policymakers. Minder madness joins the surge of "background briefings" and the decline of access to decision-makers as evidence that the White House—and other big instititutions—are manipulating the press. It's that, but it's also something worse: It's evidence that journalists are ceding control when they should be seizing it, accepting canned news rather than breaking it. Farhi writes, "Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between...

According to the AP, a CIA agent’s name was leaked by the White House . The AP calls it an “embarrassing flub” even though it was a crime when an aide in the Bush administration leaked the name of part-time agent Valerie Plame. What’s given little attention in the story is the fact that the Washington Post reporter who wrote the story sent his copy to the White House to be checked for “accuracy.” ... First of all, any reporter worth his salt would not depend on the subject he’s reporting on to verify accuracy. That’s just crazy. He’d make...

In June 2013 Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department. The most transparent administration in history has largely refused to respond to FIOA requests concerning Benghazi. Judicial Watch had enough and filed suit. The result is fairly substantial evidence that the administration made up the anti-Mohammed video protest to save face for Obama. Jay Carney continues the charade, pretending the emails don’t actually mean what they say. The most transparent administration in history wants us to believe that straight forward emails aren’t at all straight forward. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise....

Bill O’Reilly said there’s no question that the White House misrepresented the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack in Benghazi. Five days after the attack, then-Ambassador Susan Rice told the world that the attack was not pre-planned and was a spontaneous reaction to a YouTube video. “That was not true, that was not even close to being true,” O’Reilly said. According to a White House memo obtained by Judicial Watch, Ben Rhodes sent an email to prep Rice about the attack, listing the following two goals:

In his speech last January at the Conservative Forum in Silicon Valley, Evan Sayet addressed the question of “Why the Mainstream Media gets Every Major Story Not Just Wrong But as Wrong as Wrong Can Be.” The short answer to the question about the media’s utter, complete and total failure, Sayet claims, is that to today’s “journalists,” “It’s an act of bigotry, to be an objective reporter.” This is the line that Rush Limbaugh, in his hour-long rhapsodizing on the speech, called “brilliant,” saying “I wish I’d thought of it myself.” Rush’s plaudits aside (indeed, he has cited Sayet’s speech...

A plan by the Federal Communications Commission to study how news organizations select stories has prompted about 10,000 people to sign a petition saying “no government monitors in newsrooms.” That’s according to the American Center for Law and Justice, which announced the petition Wednesday and said it reached that number within the first two hours. The agency announced a Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs last year, explaining that it wanted to understand the process of which stories are selected, station priorities, content production, populations served, perceived station bias, and perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the “critical...

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times. The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in...

After ringing in the new year resolving to help Americans make government as irrelevant as possible, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin added another resolution on Saturday: be more aggressive in calling out the so-called "lamestream" media for their "lapdog laziness." She related how Richard Nixon's presidency was ended once reporters busted him for spying, but Obama is celebrated even though one of his hallmarks has been the National Security Agency widespread spying programs. Palin said she was glad to "hear the new political year kicked off with Sen. Rand Paul suing the President for violating our rights," in reference to...

The debacle brought forth by the New York Times Benghazi whitewash and comments from Fox News Benghazi sources referring to the report as "baloney" lead me to re-purpose a graphic created back in 2011 (almost 2 years ago to the day)...

Getting it wrong, news outlets’ erroneous forecasts: Healthcare.gov like online shopping, abundant Atlantic hurricanes, $24 billion government shutdown and more. Print, broadcast or web, the media sure aren’t Nostradamus. In spite of their best attempts, the news media have gotten it wrong prediction after prediction on a wide range of business and economic issues in 2013. Just in the past year, reporters warned of “economic doomsday,” thought Healthcare.gov was going to be “easy” just like Amazon.com, and warned of melting polar ice, even as a new record was set for ice mass. In many cases, the failed predictions were an...

Tribune Co., the parent of the Los Angeles Times, unveiled a restructuring plan that will slash nearly 700 jobs over the next year. [Snip] The cutbacks indicate that the newspaper division is bracing for another drop in advertising in 2014, analysts said. Print ad revenue fell nearly $200 million in the last two years and an additional $62 million in the first nine months of this year.

The easiest way to crush a Liberal in an argument about Obama is to ask, “What would you say if Bush had done it?” In the case of ObamaCare, the lesson might be the most poignant. I found these questions on a discussion board, and decided this time, it was worth the comparison: if ObamaCare were BushCare what would the repercussions and responses be? So ask yourself these questions, and then question if ObamaCare would be deader than disco. Imagine… 1. If Republican George Bush made it mandatory that every American buy health insurance. 2. If Bush said if you...

Living in the United States is great. You can say what you want, own what you want, shoot almost anything you want – it's like a dream that's too good to be true. It can fairly be said that the United States of America has offered an unprecedented level of prosperity and freedom to more people than just about any other political system in the history of the world. After all, we don't see any evidence that the ancient Sumerians were laying rubber in from of any Dairy Queens with any 1969 B.C. Mustangs, am I right? But yet –...

ABC plans to air an 8-hour miniseries about the history of homosexual activism, penned by a prominent homosexual political activist. Homosexual writer and director Dustin Lance Black will write the miniseries. Its timeline will reportedly begin with the 1969 Stonewall Riots, in which a police raid on a gay bar resulted in several nights of violent demonstrations by homosexuals in New York City. The miniseries is expected to air sometime just before the holiday season. Gay activist Dustin Lance Black will pen the 8-hour miniseries. Black, 39, has been active in the homosexual advocacy movement since the beginning of his...

The Plain Dealer in Cleveland cut about a third of its newsroom staff Wednesday, months after announcing it was reducing home delivery of the newspaper. About 50 reporters, photographers, page designers and other Newspaper Guild-covered employees received layoff notices, according to the guild.

ABC News is being accused of deceptively editing, or at least misrepresenting (intentionally or not), some of the comments made by Juror B29, the lone “nonwhite” juror in the George Zimmerman murder trial. Further, the media as a whole are being accused of manipulating some of her statements. These allegations come not from a conservative news source, but rather from Slate.com. The key phrase latched onto by most media outlets, due to its sensational nature, was “George Zimmerman got away with murder” — words that were, in fact, said by Juror B29. But the full unedited video of the comment,...

CNN found time to broadcast a story about a "neighbor from hell" but as to harsh labor union criticism of "healthcare from hell," not a word. Not only is CNN maintaining a wall of silence on union opposition, expressed in a letter to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, to ObamaCare but pretty much the rest of the mainstream media, with the notable exceptions of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, are stubbornly remaining mum on the story despite President Obama being forced to go into campaign mode to sell his unpopular healthcare law. To read the MSM stories about...

Naturally, liberal politics runs a very very close second to this...On a totally separate note, I admittedly haven't followed this case too much. I don't follow "celebrity" trials because I fear that granting them legitimacy will dilute what real celebrity is.For instance, if guys like George Zimmerman have their 15 minutes of fame patronized what will eventually happen to the Kardashians?Eventually Kim will get desperate and commit another crime (against nature) by having another child (not with Kanye West, I'm pretty sure that's against one of the only rules Hollywood a-holes live by) just so we'll give her the kind...

Despite a heavy period of news that included the Boston Marathon bombings and the Jodi Arias trial, MSNBC's second-quarter ratings plunged to their lowest level since 2007. In primetime, MSNBC drew an average of 584,000 total viewers and 196,000 viewers in the key 25-54 age demographic. Those numbers were down 16% and 12%, respectively, from the second quarter of 2012. And they accounted for quarter lows not seen since the fourth and second quarters of 2007, respectively. The network had seen signs of this coming in some dreadful monthly ratings, particularly in May. The same factors contributed to the network's...

15 Photos From the Tahrir Square Protests You’ll Never See In Legacy Media. http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2013/07/15-photos-from-tahrir-square-protests.html Curiously, a massive wave of anti-Obama sentiment in Egypt has been utterly ignored by vintage media, even though the protests may be the largest in all of human history. [More at link]

Upon seeing his photo splashed across the cover of Time magazine with the words “Face of Buddhist Terror,” Myanmar’s most-talked-about monk was unfazed, saying no amount of bad publicity could hurt him. The 46-year-old is accustomed to—even flattered by—the foreign reporters who steadily parade through his monastery in the city of Mandalay to ask about religious violence that has swept his predominantly Buddhist nation in the last year—fueled in no small part by his anti-Muslim rhetoric. …

Richard Grenell, a political consultant and media commentator reported today via Twitter that NBC’s Mark Murray, senior political editor for NBC News wife, Sasha is an Obama appointee but never publicly disclosed it. Grenell asked Murray yesterday if he was married to an Obama appointee and why it was not disclosed. Murray told him that he hasn’t publicly disclosed that his wife is an Obama appointee because he told NBC officials and they didn’t care. Murray also told Grenell that his first wife worked for Ray Lahood so disclosing her as an Obama appointee wasn’t necessary. Murray’s wife, Sasha Johnson...

The liberal media are not really "up in arms" with the Obama administration, but are simply having a "lover's quarrel" over the AP scandal in particular, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told CNBC host Larry Kudlow on his May 16 The Kudlow Report program. What's more, it won't be that long until "[t]he Bill Clinton syndrome is going to be upon us, where it's time to move on, we've covered it [the media will say] and they're going to turn the fire right on Republicans as being obstructionists. Mark my word," the Media Research Center founder predicted. "They would report what...

Even with Republicans holding unprecedented political power across the South, Democrats remain mostly in charge of urban centers in otherwise conservative states. Yet increasingly that control is threatened, not at the ballot box, but by Republican-led legislatures reaching into local governing decisions, often over objections. In Georgia and North Carolina, GOP efforts range from regionalizing the Charlotte airport, the Atlanta metro transit system and the Asheville water system to redrawing district lines for local offices to benefit Republican candidates. Republicans insist there’s no power play at work as they do battle with Democrats such as Charlotte Mayor Antony Foxx, who...